Ask stories

I polished a Markov chain generator and trained it on an article by Uri Alon and al (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7963340/).

It generates text that seems to me at least on par with tiny LLMs, such as demonstrated by NanoGPT. Here is an example:

  jplr@mypass:~/Documenti/2025/SimpleModels/v3_very_good$
  ./SLM10b_train UriAlon.txt 3
  
  Training model with order 3...
  
  Skip-gram detection: DISABLED (order < 5)
  
  Pruning is disabled
  
  Calculating model size for JSON export...
  
  Will export 29832 model entries
  
  Exporting vocabulary (1727 entries)...
  
  Vocabulary export complete.
  
  Exporting model entries...
  
    Processed 12000 contexts, written 28765 entries (96.4%)...
  
  JSON export complete: 29832 entries written to model.json
  
  Model trained and saved to model.json
  
  Vocabulary size: 1727
  
  jplr@mypass:~/Documenti/2025/SimpleModels/v3_very_good$ ./SLM9_gen model.json

I am looking at migrating a Windows server (Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard) and I am wondering if there is some way to learn what files are being read. I know the operating system keeps this metadata but I have also learned that this metadata is unreliable. Is there a third party tool or some kind of powershell script I can use to track this data?

I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?

Founders,

what's been the hardest part of running or building your startup lately?

Whether it's fundraising, finding PMF, hiring, burnout, technical problems, customer acquisition, co-founder issues, runway stress, or anything else, we'd love to hear real stories.

I'm honestly shocked at how bad the current Facebook interface has become. I’m trying to delete a Page I own, and the platform basically makes it impossible. The options have moved or disappeared, the Page Settings menu leads to the wrong profile, Business Suite doesn’t show the Page, and the “Access and Control” section doesn’t list it at all.

Facebook keeps bouncing me between: – personal profile settings – business portfolio settings – Meta Business Suite – classic Page UI

None of them give the actual option to delete the Page. It’s like the platform actively hides the feature.

And here’s the worst part: I AM the admin. I can publish on the Page. I can edit it. I can manage everything… except delete it.

I get that Meta wants to keep pages alive for engagement and ad data, but blocking users from removing something they own is straight-up abusive UX. No user should have to waste hours navigating four different interfaces to do something basic like “delete a page.”

If anyone has figured out the REAL way to delete a Page in 2025 with the new Facebook UI (which keeps changing), please share. Meta’s documentation is outdated, and their support is nonexistent.

This shouldn’t be this hard.

I went to see my Cursor (the AI IDE) analytics and clicked a banner advertising their new company-level analytics dashboard. It now has a section “AI Edits by repository” that includes all the repositories used with Cursor, including your personal side projects. [0] I suspect they scrape the name of the repository from the list of GIT remotes, without explicit consent or notice.

If you're using Cursor with a company (teams, enterprise) subscription, information of all your code commits is sent to their API. This telemetry cannot be disabled and is available in a highly granular format in their API. [1]

The dashboard includes also includes information on when you were writing code. [2] The data is available in a highly granular format in their API. [3]

[0]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#repository-insights [1]: https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-commit-metrics-json-paginated [2] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/analytics#daily-usage [3] https://cursor.com/docs/account/teams/ai-code-tracking-api#get-ai-code-change-metrics-json-paginated

From the official grpc benchmark, it seems the performance of the C++ implementation has gone down since 2023. https://grafana-dot-grpc-testing.appspot.com/?from=now-5y&to=now

Quantum computers haven't even factored a three-digit number yet, right? I don't have handy the equivalent in discrete log solution, but... even if somehow (??!) they gain the 4+ orders of magnitude for Shor's space computation, there remain major unsolved boring problems like error correction and cooling, right?

Or have there been some galaxy-shaking developments in QC that actually make this somehow plausible?

Some recent, relevant, major discussions I brushed-up on before posting this:

* Willow announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649

* Majorana 1 announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43104071

* OpenSSH statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863242

* The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384768

edit: I do want to say, I like Vitalik a lot and I think he has a beautiful and friendly brain and heart; the few times I hung with him he has been cool as heck. This is not an anti-Vitalik post. More of a "where are we really in QC" post, which I figure some people here can summarize in fairly simple terms.

In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project.

At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?

Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to bare-metal servers like Hetzner.

Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.

Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.

- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?

[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)

I enjoy looking at the UIs of older platforms or software. Something about that pixel-ish look appeals to me more than the modern look of UI.

For me, one of my favorites was the look of some of the later PalmPilot UIs. They were surprisingly good for a display of only 160×160 pixels. They may not look the best today, but they were very functional. In some ways, I actually prefer older UI designs. Modern UI components feel more complex and, in my opinion, lead to a greater number of bugs.

What are everyone’s favorite UIs, old or modern?

Maybe an ignorant question but just wondering why someone hasn’t already done this if they are concerned about people not properly being held accountable.

I've been an "IC" for aages. Now with agentic AI, I basically am the orchestrator, approver, scheduler, big picture planner. I very rarely dive into the code in the weeds now, despite doing that full time for 10+ years (and having programmed as a hobby for 2 decades before that).

I Can get so much more done. I can approach things I wouldn't have taken on before because my natural limitations would have taken me so much longer to overcome. It's changed the entire way I exist. I have more time to think about the big picture things, not just in work, but in life. I feel more like myself, because I get to be in touch with how I actually feel more of the time, rather than having my head in that pure creative flow space. I still get into that, but it's for the planning, orchestation, rarely the code, or it's for something else unrelated to work.

I love the AI revolution. The biggest thing it's given me is time. I can literally move 100 to 200 times faster with current SOTA agentic tools, in my estimation. I feel like I'm "managing" a bunch of high performing, focused, energetic ICs. It can literally turn regular people into their own little labs. I love the AI revolution. It is so cool.

Anyone else feel this way, or can relate, or want to share their own positive experiences?

This past Friday afternoon, a member in our Discord server reported a phishing email pointing to a fake login page.

We took up to research it and because of clumsy decisions by the attacker we got their GitHub and their operational Telegram bot.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/FTy4mrH

Sometimes the attacker incompetence can be a defender's best weapon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The phishing page was a standard clone of an "email", unbranded anf generic service. A bit of gobuster reconnaissance and we got the site's .git directory publicly accessible and listing its contents.

Inspecting of the requests also got us the first Telegram bot token. This is the digital equivalent of leaving the blueprints to your entire operation, including past versions and deleted files, lying on the front lawn.

We pulled the repository, found automated deployments and multiple fake pages with different hardcoded Telegram bot tokens and Chat IDs.

With the source code, repo and the active Telegram bot token, we filed detailed abuse reports:

- GitHub: We reported the repository containing the phishing kit's source code. It was taken down for violating TOS.

- Telegram: We reported the bot using the provided token and chat ID, leading to its removal.

- Hosting Provider: The malicious site was reported and taken offline.

Lesson learned? Never deploy a .git folder to production. Even if you are a criminal.

Acknowledgement: This was a collaborative effort by members of the BeyondMachines Discord community. The crowdsourced speed and collaboration helped us take this down very fast.

literal shower-thought i had tonight as i was thinking about how at work we all don't like dealing with our helm charts because the syntax and structure ends up looking so ugly and it just feels wrong (not to mention the multiple different approaches of handling kubernetes resources in multiple different pipelines.

i try to see beyond any initial repulsion to weird looking code because i know that it may be super functional. but it got me thinking: what makes code beautiful? what makes code "high quality"? (other than that it results in a working, performant, and robust software program obviously).

so i'm curious -- can you show me the best code you've encountered? it can be a small snippet or it can be a "slice of a library" or an architecture etc. have you written anything yourself that you are super proud of?

One big problem I have with pomodoro apps: they disappear. Even when the timer's running, I forget about it.

So I built a macOS app that runs as a persistent, always-on-top sidebar. When you collapse it, it becomes a 3px colored progress bar.

That constant visual reminder helps my time-blindedness stay on track.

Curious if anyone else struggles with the same thing.

The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.

Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend

(you'll need to have showdead turned on)

Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...

I was recently laid off at a big tech company after 10 years. And now I am facing the harsh reality of trying to crack leetcode medium/hard problems (something I never managed to do routinely while I was working at this company). Is anyone here in a similar situation or has been in one? If so, how do you keep yourself motivated to solve multiple problems a day, especially knowing you are actually never going to work on such problems as part of an actual job?

Edit: I need to practice leetcode because the interview process for almost every software engineering role (especially in the Bay Area) seems to require going through at least one round of coding challenge based on leetcode medium/hard problem. I did not call it out earlier because I thought this is a very obvious point. Perhaps, I should have clarified that I am mostly targeting software engg roles.

I'm doing some research on how teams think about older codebases, and I'd love everyone's take on this. No wrong answers, just trying to understand how different teams or organizations define this.

Thank you in advance!

This is one of the recent ones that I came across - https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1988366241460089118

Of late it looks like I've been noticing more of such pointless businesses and I'm not alone. What do you think?

I mean ffs, code refactoring that took 1m30 before is now at 5m / 8m at each question.